Kristeva in this book-length essay addresses the role of abjection as a psychosocial property and a literary device.

"The horror of something grand fallen into nothingness, dissolved beyond usefulness, decayed to its primeval corpse-self, is the territory of literature where Kristeva finds the greatness of abjection.

In 2001, the then chief curator of the Louvre, Régis Michel, organized an exhibition called "Posséder et Detruire: Strategies Sexuelles dans l'art d'Occident", (Possess and Destroy,: Sexual Strategies In Western Art,)

There were in the seventeenth century many Augustinians; there was only one La Rochefoucauld.

In the Maximes (1665) La Rochefoucauld went far beyond the mere unmasking of policy that permeates his Apologie and the Mémoires, offering a more thoroughgoing unmasking of reason and of will that raised serious questions about the possibilities of independent moral questions of any kind.

Klossowski turns the sketch that is the myth into a rich and lyrical exegesis that entangles the male gaze vs the female gaze.

Pierre Klossowski, the lapsed Catholic intellectual with a Polish aristocratic title (his brother being the notorious Balthus), a childhood education in Germany, and a legacy of philosophical treatises on Nietzche and Sade, has never been the most lucid of writers. In fact he never even tried that particular trick. Klossowski studied Latin so extensively, it corrupted his French, leading him to a lifetime love of archaic words and long, multi-part sentences with some pretty extended sub-clauses. Yet his influence was such that not only did intellectual giants such as Foucault declare themselves fans, Klossowski's system of thought and of writing was an explicit influence on works like Foucault's own "History Of Sexuality".